Not
in This Desert Town
I
RECENTLY RELOCATED to Tucson, Arizona, after a
decade away. I always think of Tucson as a city
where people come to dry out — dermatologically,
emotionally, or otherwise. (If you’re
unfamiliar, Tucson is famous for having the same
moisture level as a baked tortilla chip). So
when I heard that someone wanted to build a
massive data center here, my first thought was,
Ah, a tech company trying to prove it can make
Tucson even drier than it already is.
It
was calling its proposal Project Blue, a
mysterious name that sounds like a Cold War
operation, or a rejected Gatorade flavor. It
was, in fact, a proposal for a massive data
center, reportedly linked to Amazon, that would
suck millions of gallons of water every
year.
At
first, I wasn’t entirely sure what a data center
did. I imagined endless halls where tech bros in
North Face vests whispered sweet nothings into
blinking machines. It turns out they’re just
enormous, glorified basements for the internet.
They hold your unread emails, abandoned online
shopping carts, and questionable search
histories in air-conditioned perpetuity. And
they’re increasingly powering the artificial
intelligence (AI) that’s demanding more and more
data centers. Beyond the huge amounts of energy
these centers require, those blinking machines
that hold all this “intelligence” get hot. Very
hot. And to cool them, they need water — a lot
of it….
Now,
if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Tucson
since moving back, aside from the fact that I
shouldn’t eat the seafood, it’s that you don’t
mess with the water. The water here is sacred.
When word got out that this project might siphon
hundreds of millions of gallons a year, the
public did what concerned citizens of any city
should do: They showed up in droves to yell at
the government.
Environmental justice activist
Karina Gonzalez shares this story of people
power and corporate accountability in
Arizona.
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